by Tim Lebbon
If I cut them, Jack thought, will they bleed?
“Hang on,” his mum said, and he knew that the pain had begun. He turned back and saw her sink slowly to her knees in the lane, his dad standing over her, one hand reaching out but not touching her shoulder because he did not know what to do. It was always Jack’s mum who did the comforting, the mollycoddling when Dad had a cold, the reassuring when Jack woke from nightmares and became frustrated when he just could not explain exactly what they were about. And now that she needed comforting, his dad was standing there like he was balancing a teacup on the back of his hand, unable to help his wife where she knelt bleeding and crying into the muck.
“Mum,” Jack said, “my teacher said that pain is transitory.”
“Big words, Jackie,” she said, trying to smile for him.
“It’s what he said, though. He was telling us because Jamie was going to the dentist for a filling, and he was scared of the needle. Mr. Travis said pain is transitory, you feel it when it happens but afterward you can’t remember exactly what it was like. You can’t recreate pain in your memories because your body won’t let you. Otherwise it’ll only hurt again.”
His dad handed her a handkerchief and she lifted her sleeve slowly, revealing some of the smaller cuts and dabbing at them as if that would take her attention from the gaping wound in her shoulder. “The point being?” she said, sharply but not unkindly. Jack could see that she was grateful for the distraction.
“Well, if you’re hurting just cast your mind into the future. When you’re all better, you won’t even remember what the hurting was like. And pain doesn’t actually hurt you, anyway. It’s only in your head. Your cuts will heal, Mum. In a few days it won’t matter.”
“In a few days…” she said, smiling and sighing and opening her mouth as if to finish the sentence. But she left it at that.
“It’s almost midday,” his dad said.
“I should be in school.”
“School’s off, kiddo!” Tears were cascading past his mum’s smiling mouth.
“We should get moving, if we can. Janey, you think you can move, honey? If we’re going to get to Tewton—”
“Where are we now?” Jack’s mum asked suddenly.
His dad frowned but did not answer.
“Gray? Don’t tell me that. Don’t say we’re lost.”
“Well,” he said, “Tall Stennington is maybe three miles back thataway.” He turned and pointed the way they had come, though Jack thought he was probably off by about a sixth of a circle anyway. “So we must be nearing the river by now. You think, Jackie?”
You think, Jackie? His dad, asking him for advice in something so important. He tried to see himself from his father’s eyes. Short, skinny, into books instead of his dad’s beloved football, intelligent in his own right but academically average… a kid. Just a kid. However much Jack thought about things, used big words, had a hard-on when he watched bikini-clad women on holiday programs… he was just a kid to his dad.
“No,” Jack said. “I think you’re a bit off there, Dad. I reckon we’re closer to Peter’s Acre than anything, so we really need to head more that way, if we can.” He pointed off across the fields to where the landscape rose in the distance, lifting toward a heavily wooded hillside. “Tewton is over that hill, through the woods. If you drive you go that way, yes,” he said, indicating the direction his father had suggested. “But if I were a crow, I’d go there.”
“So by the time we get that far,” his mum said, “what I’m feeling now I’d have forgotten.”
Jack nodded, but he was frowning.
“Ok, Jackie. Let’s hit it.” And up she stood, careful not to look down at the strip of her husband’s T-shirt wrapped around her shoulder, already stained a deep, wet red.
They left the lane and moved off across the fields toward the tree-covered hillside in the distance. Between them and the woods lay several fields, a veiny network of hedges, hints of other lanes snaking from here to there and a farmstead. It looked quiet and deserted; no smoke rose from its chimneys; its yard seemed, from this distance, empty and still. Yet for the first time, Jack was glad that his dad was carrying the gun.
Something had changed, Jack thought, since before their flight from the dead people and his mother being tangled and wounded in the hedge. It was her attitude to things—the nervousness had been swept aside by the pain, so that now she seemed to accept things more as they came than as she expected them to be. But this change in his mother had also moved down the line to his father and himself, altering the subtle hierarchy of the family, shifting emphases around so that none of them were quite the people they had been that morning.
Jack suddenly wanted to see Mandy. In the four years since her leaving home she had become something of a stranger. They still saw her on occasion— though it was always she who came to visit them— but she changed so much every time that Jack would see a different person walking in the door. She and Jack were still very close and there was an easy atmosphere between them that his parents seemed to resent, but she was not the Mandy he remembered.
Sometimes Jack would imagine that his sister was still living at home. He would go into her bedroom, and although it had been cleared out by his parents and left sterile and bland—forever awaiting a visitor to abuse its neatness—he could sense her and hear her and smell her. Only his memories placed her there, of course, but he would sit and chat with her for hours.
Sometimes, when he next spoke to her on the phone, they would carry on their conversation.
“When can we go to see Mandy?” he asked, realizing as he spoke that he sounded like a whiner. They were going, that was that, and they certainly could not move any faster.
“We’ll be there by tonight, Jackie,” his mother said comfortingly.
“You do love her, don’t you?” he asked.
“Of course we do! She’s our daughter—your sister— so of course we love her!”
“So why don’t we go to see her anymore?”
His mother was silent for a while, his father offering no help. There was only the crunch of their feet crushing new grass into crisp green fragments in the dirt. It sounded to Jack as though they were walking on thin ice.
“Sometimes people fall out,” his mother said. “There was that time she made you run away—”
“She didn’t make me. I told you, I did it myself!”
His mother winced in pain as she turned to him and Jack felt ashamed, ashamed that he was putting her through this soon after she had been dragged through a wire fence and torn to shreds. But then, he thought, maybe there was no better time. Her defenses were down, the pain was filtering her thoughts and letting only essential ones through, holding back the ballast and, maybe, discarding it altogether.
“Mandy scared you,” she said. “She was doing something she shouldn’t have been doing and she scared you and you ran away. We didn’t find you until the next day, and you don’t…” She looked up at the sky, but Jack could still see the tears. “You don’t know what that night did to your Dad and me.”
“But you still love her?”
His mother nodded. “Of course we do.”
Jack thought about this for a while, wondering whether easy talk and being together were really the most important things there were. “That’s okay then,” he said finally. “I’m hungry.”
Mum dying because she’s hurt, he thought, naming his fears automatically. Things changing, it’s all still changing. Dead people. I’m afraid of the dead people.
“We’ll eat when we get to Tewton,” his dad said from up ahead.
“And I’m thirsty.” No food, no drink… no people at all. Death; we could die out here.
“When we get to Tewton, Jackie,” his dad said, more forcefully than before. He turned around and Jack could see how much he had changed, even over the last hour. The extraordinary had been presented to him, thrust in his face in the form of a gang of dead people, denying disbelief. Unimaginable, impossible, true
.
“I expect those people just wanted help, Dad.” He knew it was crazy even as he said it—he knew they’d wanted more than that; he had seen the fresh blood— but maybe the idea would drain some of the strain from his dad’s face. And maybe a lie could hide the truth, and help hold back his mother’s pain, and bring Mandy back to them where she belonged, and perhaps they were only on a quiet walk in the country…
“Come on, son,” his father said, and Jack did not know whether he meant move along, or give me a break. Whatever, he hated the air of defeat in his voice.
My dad, failing, he thought. Pulling away from things already, falling down into himself. What about Mum? What about me?
Who’s going to protect us?
They had crossed one field and were nearing the edge of another when Jack suddenly recognized their surroundings. To the left stood an old barn, doors rotted away and ivy making its home between the stones. The ivy was dead now, but still it clotted the building’s openings, as if holding something precious inside. To the right, at the far corner of the field, an old metal plow rusted down into the ground. He remembered playing war here, diving behind the plow while Jamie threw mud grenades his way, ack—ack—acting a stream of machine-gun fire across the field, crawling through the rape crop and plowing their own paths toward and away from each other. Good times, and lost times, never to be revisited; he felt that now more than ever. Lost times.
“I know this place!” he said. “There’s a pond over there behind that hedge, with an island in the middle and everything!” He ran to the edge of the field, aiming for the gate where it stood half open.
“Jack, wait!” his dad shouted, but Jack was away, cool breeze ruffling his hair and lifting some of the nervous sweat from his skin. The crinkle of shoots beneath his feet suddenly seemed louder and Jack wanted nothing more than to get out onto the road, leave these dead things behind, find a car or thumb a lift into Tewton where there would be help, where there had to be help, because if there wasn’t then where the hell would there be help?
Nowhere. There’s no help anywhere. The thought chilled him, but he knew it was true, just as he had known that there were dead people around the corner of the field—
—just as he knew that there was something very, very wrong here as well. He could smell it already, a rich, warm tang to the air instead of the musty smell of death they had been living with all morning. A fresh smell. But he kept on running because he could not do anything else, even though he knew he should stay in the field, knew he had to stay in the field for his own good. He had played here with Jamie. They had shared good times here so it must be a good place.
Jack darted through the gate and out onto the pitted road.
The colors struck him first. Bright colors in a landscape so dull with death.
The car was a blazing yellow, a metal banana his mum would have called it, never lose that in a car park she would say. Inside the car sat a woman in a red dress, and inside the woman moved something else, a squirrel, its tail limp and heavy with her blood. The dress was not all red, he could see a white sleeve and a torn white flap hanging from the open door, touching the road.
Her face had been ripped off, her eyes torn out, her throat chewed away.
There was something else on the road next to the car, a mass of meat torn apart and spread across the tarmac. Jack saw the flash of bone and an eyeless head and a leg, still attached to the bulky torso by strands of stuff, but they did not truly register. What he did see and understand were the dozen small rodents chewing at the remnants of whatever it had been. Their tails were long and hairless, their bodies black and slick with the blood they wallowed in. They chewed slowly, but not thoughtfully because there could not have been a single thought in their little dead minds.
“Dad,” Jack gasped, trying to shout but unable to find a breath.
More things lay farther toward the pond, and for a terrible moment Jack thought it was another body that had been taken apart (because that’s what he saw, he knew that now, his mind had permitted understanding on the strict proviso that he—)
He turned and puked and fell to his knees in his own vomit, looking up to see his father standing at the gate and staring past him at the car.
Jack looked again, and he realized that although the thing farther along the road had once been a person— he could see its head, like a shop dummy’s that had been stepped on and covered in shit and set on fire so the eyes melted and rolled out to leave black pits— there was no blood at all, no wetness there. Nothing chewed on these sad remains.
Dead already when the car ran them over. Standing there in the road, dead already, letting themselves be hit so that the driver—he had been tall, good looking, the girl in his passenger seat small and mouselike and scared into a gibbering, snotty wreck—would get out and go to see what he had done. Opening himself up to attack from the side, things darting from the ditches and downing him and falling on him quickly… and quietly. No sound apart from the girl’s screams as she saw what was happening, and then her scream had changed in tone.
When they’d had their fill, they dragged themselves away to leave the remains to smaller dead things.
“Oh God, Dad!” Jack said, because he did not want to know anymore. Why the hell should he? How the hell did he know what he knew already?
His dad reached down and scooped him up into his arms, pressing his son’s face into his shoulder so he did not have to look anymore. Jack raised his eyes and saw his mother walk slowly from the field, and she was trying not to look as well. She stared straight at Jack’s face, her gaze unwavering, her lips tensed with the effort of not succumbing to human curiosity and subjecting herself to a sight that would live with her forever.
But of course she looked, and her liquid scream hurt Jack as much as anything ever had. He loved his mum because she loved him; he knew how much she loved him. His parents had bought him a microscope for Christmas and she’d pricked her finger with a needle so that he could look at her blood, that’s how much she loved him. He hated to hear her scared, hated to see her in pain. Her fear and agony were all his own.
His father turned and ushered his mum down the road, away from the open banana car with its bright red mess, away from the bloody dead things eating up what was left. Jack, facing back over his dad’s shoulder, watched the scene until it disappeared around a bend in the road. He listened to his father’s labored breathing and his mother’s panicked gasps. He looked at the pale green hedges, where even now hints of rot were showing through. And he wanted to go home.
“Are you scared, Jack?” Mandy had asked.
“No,” he said truthfully.
“Not of me,” she smiled. “Not of Mum and Dad and what’s happening, that’ll sort itself out. I mean ever. Are you ever scared of things? The dark, spiders, death, war, clowns? Ever, ever, ever?”
Jack went to shake his head, but then he thought of things that did frighten him a little. Not outright petrified, just disturbed, that’s how he sometimes felt. Maybe that’s what Mandy meant.
“Well,” he said, “there’s this thing on TV. It’s Planet of the Apes, the TV show, not the film. There’s a bit at the beginning with the gorilla army man, Urko. His face is on the screen and sometimes it looks so big that it’s bigger than the screen. It’s really in the room, you know? Well… I hide behind my hands.”
“But do you peek?”
“No!”
“I’ve seen that program,” Mandy said, even though Jack was pretty sure she had not. “I’ve seen it, and you know what? There’s nothing at all to be scared of. I’ll tell you why: The bit that scares you is made up of a whole bunch of bits that won’t. A man in a suit; a camera trick, an actor, a nasty voice. And that man in the suit goes home at night, has a cup of tea, picks his nose and goes to the toilet. Now that’s not very scary, is it?”
Even though he felt ill Jack giggled and shook his head. “No!” He wondered whether the next time he watched that opening sequence, he’d be
as scared as before. He figured maybe he would, but in a subtly different way. A grown-up way.
“Fear’s made up of a load of things,” she said, “and if you know those things… if you can name them… you’re most of the way to accepting your fear.”
“But what if you don’t know what it is? What if you can’t say what’s scaring you?”
His sister looked up at the ceiling and tried to smile, but she could not. “I’ve tried it, over the last few days,” she whispered. “I’ve named you, and Mum, and Dad, and the woods, and what happened, and you… out there in the woods, alone… and loneliness itself. But it doesn’t work.” She looked down at Jack again, looked straight into his eyes. “If that happens then it should be scaring you. Real fear is like intense pain. It’s there to warn you something’s truly wrong.”
I hope I always know, Jack thought. I hope I always know what I’m afraid of.
Mandy began singing softly. Jack slept.
“Oh no! Dad, it’s on fire!”
They had left the scene of devastation and headed toward the farm they’d spotted earlier, intending to find something to eat. It went unspoken that they did not expect to discover anyone alive at the farm. Jack only hoped they would not find anyone dead, either.
They paused in the lane, which was so infrequently used that grass and dock leaves grew in profusion along its central hump. Insipid green grass and yellowed dock now, though here and there tufts of rebellious life still poked through. The puddled wheel ruts held the occasional dead thing swimming feebly.
Jack’s dad raised his binoculars, took a long look at the farm and lowered them again. “It’s not burning. Something is, but it’s not the farm. A bonfire, I think. I think the farmer’s there, and he’s started a bonfire in his yard.”
“I wonder what he could be burning,” Jack’s mother said. She was pale and tired, her left arm tucked between the buttons of her shirt to try to ease the blood loss. Jack wanted to cry every time he looked at her, but he could see tears in her eyes as well, and he did not want to give her cause to shed any more.
